WineX - Winning Concept
A competition-winning concept for a wine experience centre in San Giustino Valdarno, Tuscany — built into an existing commercial structure, off the main tourist routes.
The design treats the building as a tool for converting visitors into customers, with the storypath itself doing the work.
A site in Tuscany — but not the Tuscany that ends up on itineraries. San Giustino Valdarno sits away from the established wine tourism circuit, in a town with an existing commercial structure looking for a second life. The brief was to convert that structure into a public showcase for Italian wine and the makers behind it, and to do it in a way that would draw visitors to a destination they wouldn't otherwise choose.
Two requirements ran in parallel: an exhibition serious enough to teach, and a commercial engine genuinely connected to the wineries it represented.
The exhibition was structured as a single ascending storypath. Visitors enter at the fundamentals — hands, soil, tools — and move outward into the vineyards before stepping into the making process itself. The architectural decision sat at the aging stage: visitors rise to the second storey alongside the wine, the building's geometry doing the metaphor without having to state it.
Upstairs, the exhibition opens into four regional sections covering Italy's main wine territories, with grape varieties anchoring each one and connected topics — aroma, glassware, pairing — woven through. The regional sections deliberately intersect with marketplaces showcasing partner wineries, so the educational content and the commercial content are never in separate rooms. The exhibition is the catalogue.
The connective device is the WineX card. Visitors collect aromas and wines of interest as they move through the storypath; by the time they reach the tasting room, the sommelier has their preference profile in hand and can recommend against it rather than from scratch. The card then links directly to the online store, so the tasting room isn't the end of the relationship — it's the calibration point for it. The exhibition trains the customer, the card carries the training out of the building.
The project won the WineX competition for the San Giustino Valdarno site. The brief asked for a concept capable of turning an off-route location into an epicentre for Italian wine; the judging selected this proposal against that question.
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